Cloud Computing Turns Virtual Teams Into a Competitive Advantage

Collaboration in the cloud is the future of business. Web 2.0 and cloud computing make it possible to solve the final challenge of coordination and management. If you're inside a larger enterprise, you can use collaboration in the cloud to compete with lean, nimble startups, or to better coordinate across different groups, offices, and divisions.

We've heard all the buzzwords before. Virtual companies. Offshoring. Free agent nation. But this time, it's for real. The future of business is no longer enormous, vertically integrated titans (anyone check Ford's stock price recently?), but rather small, nimble, federations.

Historically, the cost of coordination has outweighed the benefits of agility, which is why the virtual corporation had a hard time breaking through. But today's cloud technologies, with their ability to bridge the gaps between firms, and between businesses and consumers, are spawning a new generation of collaboration tools that slash the cost of coordination, unlocking a potential revolution in organization and management.

And thanks to the current economic crisis, the business world is ripe for revolution. The mantra of "too big to fail" has been proven yet another meaningless buzzword by the fall of corporate giants like GM and Citigroup. "Small is the new big" is taking its place, and this advice applies to both small businesses and major corporations.

In a down economy, survival depends on the classic small business strength of doing more with less, especially businesses that have been hit with layoffs. If you're not already outsourcing and offshoring, you will be soon. Flexibility is the name of the game, and collaboration technology is the key to achieving that flexibility in a swift and cost-efficient manner.

The result of this intersection between crisis, technology, and opportunity? Collaboration in the cloud will fundamentally change the business ecosystem, resulting in an explosion of virtual companies and nimble players, as well as savvy intrapreneurs within traditional firms.

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A History of Collaboration and Collaboration Solutions(The following section covers the history of collaboration and business. If one is to argue that a revolution is at hand, it's necessary to provide the story of how we arrived at the pivotal moment. If you're already convinced, and want to skip to practical tips on how to survive and thrive during the revolution, skip ahead to the next section, "How Does Collaboration Help Me Do More With Less?" And now, back to the story.)

Wikipedia (itself an exemplar of massively parallel collaboration) defines collaboration software as "Software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals." In the end, collaboration is the heart of business. The purpose of the firm is to organize a group of people to accomplish a common task that they could not complete on their own. Capitalism is collaboration. Trade, comparative advantage, and Adam Smith's invisible hand all presume the presence of collaboration.

The evolution of capitalism and the rise of the corporation is the story of collaboration. Financiers collaborate with industrialists. Workers collaborate on assembly lines. Corporations exist to provide the necessary infrastructure for collaboration.

Historically, much of that infrastructure was physical. Factory workers need a factory to house their assembly line. Office workers need an office so that they can hold meetings and create, store, and exchange documents. The costs of coordination were such that economies of scale tended to dominate.

Assembling an automobile is an enormously complicated task, and assembling millions of automobiles requires a degree of precision and coordination that didn't exist before the rise of the corporation. It made sense for Henry Ford to vertically integrate his company, since the costs (both monetary and in terms of productivity) to organize a federation of small firms and individuals to carry out the litany of tasks involved in producing Model Ts would have been prohibitive in the extreme. Collaboration took the form of work rules, memos, and meetings, primarily within the enterprise.

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Well put. Collaboration is definitly the future of surviving and thriving business. And not just for asynchronous collab, on the real-time side, there's a lot of excitement too. For example, http://see.nefsis.com uses true cloud computing to reduce latency in desktop sharing and live multiparty video. Cloud computing makes a fundamental improvement in roundtrip latency here, unobtainable by single-server and centralized technologies.

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Digital Transformation is the ultimate goal of cloud computing and related initiatives. The phrase is certainly not a precise one, and as subject to hand-waving and distortion as any high-falutin' terminology in the world of information technology.
Yet it is an excellent choice of words to describe what enterprise IT—and by extension, organizations in general—should be working to achieve.
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handling all the data types being found and created in the organization
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You often hear the two titles of "DevOps" and "Immutable Infrastructure" used independently.
In his session at DevOps Summit, John Willis, Technical Evangelist for Docker, covered the union between the two topics and why this is important. He provided an overview of Immutable Infrastructure then showed how an Immutable Continuous Delivery pipeline can be applied as a best practice for "DevOps." He ended the session with some interesting case study examples.

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If you have been part of any web-based development, odds are you have worked with JavaScript in one form or another. In this article, I'll focus on the aspects of JavaScript that are relevant within the Node.js environment.

Alibaba, the world’s largest ecommerce provider, has pumped over a $1 billion into its subsidiary, Aliya, a cloud services provider. This is perhaps one of the biggest moments in the global Cloud Wars that signals the entry of China into the main arena. Here is why this matters.
The cloud industry worldwide is being propelled into fast growth by tremendous demand for cloud computing services. Cloud, which is highly scalable and offers low investment and high computational capabilities to end users by eliminating the need to buy costly infrastructure and instead rent it from cloud providers, i...

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Auto-scaling environments, micro-service architectures and globally-distributed teams are just three common examples of why organizations today need automation and interoperability more than ever. But is interoperability something we simply start doing, or does it require a reexamination of our processes? And can we really improve our processes without first making interoperability a requirement for how we choose our tools?

Cloud Migration Management (CMM) refers to the best practices for planning and managing migration of IT systems from a legacy platform to a Cloud Provider through a combination professional services consulting and software tools.
A Cloud migration project can be a relatively simple exercise, where applications are migrated ‘as is’, to gain benefits such as elastic capacity and utility pricing, but without making any changes to the application architecture, software development methods or business processes it is used for.

The Internet of Things. Cloud. Big Data. Real-Time Analytics. To those who do not quite understand what these phrases mean (and let’s be honest, that’s likely to be a large portion of the world), words like “IoT” and “Big Data” are just buzzwords. The truth is, the Internet of Things encompasses much more than jargon and predictions of connected devices. According to Parker Trewin, Senior Director of Content and Communications of Aria Systems, “IoT is big news because it ups the ante: Reach out and touch somebody is becoming reach out and touch everything.” In my previous blog, we talked about...

At DevOps Summit NY there’s been a whole lot of talk about not just DevOps, but containers, IoT, and microservices. Sessions focused not just on the cultural shift needed to grow at scale with a DevOps approach, but also made sure to include the network ”plumbing” needed to ensure success as applications decompose into the microservice architectures enabling rapid growth and support for the Internet of (Every)Things.

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